Polar Star (44 page)

“Mike was crazy about Zina,” Ridley said. “He ratted to the captain. Then when he was dead, with all those Aleuts watching we just wanted to get out of port. We’ll off-load on the mainland later.” Ridley turned to Morgan. “Right, Captain? We all have different interests, some rational and some purely patriotic. The question is,” he went on, switching to Russian to ask Karp, “what team are you on? Are you Renko’s partner or are you our partner?”

“You speak Russian,” Arkady said.

“Better than Esperanto,” Ridley said.

“I followed Renko to get rid of him,” Karp said.

“Do it,” Ridley said.

“Let Renko go, alone,” Morgan ordered.

Ridley sighed and asked Coletti, “Who needs this shit from Captain Bligh?”

Arkady was amazed at Morgan’s reaction time. Coletti turned, aimed and fired, and only punched in a window by the stairs Morgan jumped from. But while Morgan was in midair, Coletti fired the second barrel. The vest exploded. The captain landed on the deck covered in feathers and blood.

“Like a fucking duck.” Coletti broke the shotgun and reloaded a single shell.

Morgan squirmed against the winch, trying to rise and reach his own weapon, which lay under him. His right shoulder and ear were red pulp. His jaw was pocked red.

“Your turn,” Ridley told Karp. “You wanted Renko? Take him.”

“Who killed Zina?” Karp asked.

Coletti stood over Morgan, the shotgun at the captain’s head, but he paused at the sound of Karp’s voice.

“Renko told us she drowned,” Ridley said.

“We know Zina was here,” Arkady said. “At the dance you pretended to be drunk. You came back early to the
Eagle
and you waited for her to swim over.”

“No,” Ridley said. “I was sick, I told you before.”

“She followed you,” Arkady said. “We found marks, her hair; there’s no doubt she was here.”

“Okay, I came back and suddenly she was on board.” Although Ridley was behind him, Arkady could feel the gun waver. “Look, Karp, the entire enterprise depended on everyone acting normal and staying in place: Americans here, Soviets there, a joint venture.”

“Zina was very attractive,” Arkady said.

“Who killed her?” Karp repeated.

Coletti’s shotgun rose from Morgan.

“No one,” Ridley said. “Zina sprang this crazy plan. She had this bag and she wanted to take back one of our survival suits so she could wear it the next time she went overboard. Insane. She’d jump when we were far away, then we’d pick her up miles away from the
Polar Star
. She said that as long as they weren’t missing any survival gear they’d give her up for dead.”

“I’m sure you have excellent survival suits.” Arkady admired Zina’s plan. That was what she’d come for, of course. “It could have worked.”

“Karp, I blame myself,” Ridley said. “I told her she was your girl and she’d have to go back to the
Polar Star
the way she came. I guess she didn’t make it.”

“You’re missing a card,” Karp said.

Ridley paused. “Missing a card?”

“The queen of hearts,” Karp said. “She collected them from lovers.”

Coletti was exasperated. “What the fuck is Karp talking about?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’ve got another bad partner,” Ridley said. “Cover the ape.” He took the gun from Arkady’s head. “Have to save shots.” From inside his slicker he took an ice pick. As Arkady tried to turn, Ridley drove the pick into his chest.

The force of the blow dropped Arkady to the deck. He sat against the storage box and groped inside his jacket.

Ridley turned to Karp. “She seduced me. Who was going to resist Zina after four months at sea? But blackmailing me to help her defect?” He raised his gun. “You people live in a different world. A fucking different world.”

Arkady fired the flare gun. He’d aimed at Ridley’s back, but the flare caromed off the engineer’s cap, leaving it ablaze like a matchhead.

Ridley whipped off the burning cap. As he swung around to Arkady a black spider flew over the engineer’s shoulder and stretched across his face. It was the three-legged grappling hook that the trawlmaster had been holding. While one prong sank through a cheek, another probed his ear. Karp wrapped the line around Ridley’s neck, shutting off the air to his scream. Coletti looked for an angle of fire, but Karp and the engineer were too close together. Karp wrapped the line around Ridley like a man binding barrel staves. Ridley fired his cowboy gun wide twice, and the third time the hammer came down on an empty breech. His eyes twisted back as he dropped the gun.

“Jesus Christ,” Coletti said.

Arkady freed the pick. The tip was red, but the rest of the shaft had been buried in the two life vests he wore.

“You only have one shell left.” Morgan nodded at
Coletti’s shotgun. The captain had finally rolled off his own weapon. He pointed it at his deckhand.

Ridley struggled as Karp yanked him backward along the gunwale, snapping icicles like chimes. Sometimes a boat brought up halibut, a fish that was as big as a man and could thrash like a man and had to be killed as quickly as possible with a spike through the brain. With his arms tied tight, Ridley looked a little like a landed fish, though Karp was taking his time finishing him.

Arkady got to his feet. “Where are her jacket and bag?”

“We dumped them at sea long ago,” Coletti said. “No one will ever find them. I mean, what were the odds she was going to come up in a fucking net?”

“Ridley killed Zina. Mike, too?” Arkady asked.

“Not me. I was in the bar. I have witnesses,” Coletti said. “What does it matter?”

“I just like to be absolutely certain.”

Karp threw the loose end of the line four meters high over the stern gantry, caught the line on the way down and started hauling Ridley up hand over hand. The engineer was good-sized, but the rope slipped friction-free over the icy transom. He’d stopped kicking.

“How are you?” Arkady asked Morgan.

“Nothing broken. I have morphine and penicillin.” Morgan spat beads onto the deck. “Steel shot. Not as bad as lead.”

“Really?” Arkady recalled that Susan had called Morgan invulnerable; perhaps not impenetrable, he thought, but fairly invulnerable. “Even a superman can’t run a boat with one arm.”

“The captain and I can work something out.” Coletti’s face showed the strain of a man making fresh calculations. “I’ll tell you this, I’ve got a better chance than you. How far do you think Karp will let you get?”

Karp secured the rope around the hydraulic levers on the
gantry post so that Ridley swayed clear of the deck. His head seemed to be unscrewing from his shoulders, east to west.

“This is an American boat in American waters,” Morgan said. “You don’t have proof of anything, not really.”

As Karp took a step from the gantry, Coletti raised the shotgun. “I still have one shell,” he told Arkady. “Get that psycho out of here.”

Karp eyed Coletti speculatively, gauging the distance across the deck and his chances against the spreading pattern of a shotgun, but the fire in him was gone.

Arkady joined Karp. “Now you know.”

“Renko,” Morgan called.

“Morgan,” he called in return.

“Go back,” Morgan said. “I’ll get the radios up and tell Marchuk everything is under control.”

Respectfully Arkady gazed around the frozen ship, the shattered window, Ridley’s smoldering cap on the deck, his body dangling from the crosspiece of the gantry.

“Good,” Arkady said. “Then you can tell Captain Marchuk he has
two
fishermen coming back.”

31
Arkady fished out Slezko’s cigarettes, which he shared with Karp. The walk had the aspect of a stroll.

“You know the song ‘Ginger Moll’?” Karp asked.

“Yes.”

“ ‘Why’ve you gone and plucked your eyebrows, bitch? And why’ve you put your blue beret on, you whore?’ ” Karp’s voice rose to a husky tenor as he sang. “That was Zina and me. She treated me like dirt. ‘You know for a fact that I’m crazy about you, I’d be glad to spend all my time thieving for you, but lately you’ve been stepping out a bit too much.’ ”

“I heard you on her tape.”

“She liked my songs. That’s how we met. I had a table of friends at the Golden Horn. We were singing and having a good time, and I could see her watching and listening from across the restaurant. I said to myself, ‘That’s for me!’ She moved in a week later. She slept around, but men meant nothing to her, so how could I be jealous? She operated outside the rules. If Zina had a weakness,
it was all her ideas about the West, as if it was paradise. That was her only flaw.”

“I found a jacket with a hemful of jewels.”

“She liked jewels,” Karp granted. “But I watched her take over the
Polar Star
. I couldn’t get her on board with any amount of money. Then we found Slava, and she took care of Marchuk. When we left port she worked her way through the ship. If she’d wanted you, she’d have had you.”

“In a way she did.” Arkady thought of the tapes.

By the compass, they were on a line to the
Polar Star
. A curiosity of the fog was that they seemed to be making no progress. With every step they were surrounded by the same periphery of fog, as if they were continually stepping in place.

The ache in Arkady’s chest seeped through the rest of his body. Hail to tobacco, the poor man’s sedative. Morgan might radio Marchuk that two men were returning, but who could prove one hadn’t lost his way, met a bear, walked onto soft ice and slipped from the glittering face of the earth?

“You met Ridley when he spent those two weeks on the ship?” Arkady asked.

“The second week he said to me, ‘Religion is the opium of the masses.’ He said it in Russian. Then he said, ‘Cocaine is the business of the masses.’ I knew right then. When I got back to Vladivostok, I told Zina about this fantastic connection, and that it was too bad she couldn’t get on board. But she found a way. What is fate? Birds fly from a nest in Africa to a branch in Moscow. Every winter the same nest, every summer the same tree. Is it magnetic? Can they tell by the angle of the sun? Every eel in the world is born in the Sargasso Sea, then each one heads to his predestined stream, sometimes swimming for years. When Zina was born in Georgia, what led her to Siberia, then to the sea?”

“The same things that led you to me,” Arkady said.

“What’s that?”

“Murder, money, greed.”

“More than that,” Karp insisted. “Someplace to breathe. Right now this is the freest you or I will ever be. Morgan isn’t going to report what happened to Ridley; he was ready to kill him too. I sank what I was smuggling. So far I haven’t done anything wrong at all.”

“What about Volovoi? When Vladivostok takes a look at his slit throat, there’ll be questions asked.”

“Fuck! I can’t go straight even if I wanted to.”

“It’s tough.”

Karp coaxed a drag from his butt. “Rules,” he said. “It’s like the blue line you see on the wall at school. Blue line on a shitty plaster wall. In every room, every hall, every school. It starts at shoulder level, and as you get bigger the line sinks to your belt, but it’s always there. I mean, it seems to stretch right across the country. In reform camp, same line. Militia office, same line. You know where it stops? I think it stops at about Irkutsk.”

“Norilsk for me.”

“East of there, no more line. Maybe they ran out of paint, maybe you can’t paint Siberia. You know, what I feel worst about is Ridley sleeping with Zina. She always took a playing card, a queen of hearts, like a trophy. Did you see the cards on Ridley’s bunk? I looked through the whole deck. No queen of hearts. That’s how I knew she’d been on the
Eagle
.”

Arkady pulled up his jacket sleeve and gave Karp a card with a stylized queen in a robe of hearts. “I palmed it before I spread the deck,” Arkady said.

“You prick!”

“It took you forever to notice.”

“Brass bastard.” Karp stopped to stare at the card in disbelief. “You’re the one man I thought was honest.”

“No,” Arkady said. “Not when I’m trapped by a man with an ax. Anyway, it worked; we did learn who killed her.”

“Fucking devious all the same.” Karp threw the card away.

They started walking again. “Remember the director at the slaughterhouse?” Karp asked. “His girls raised a reindeer like a pet, and one day it wandered into the wrong pen and they went running through the slaughterhouse looking for it. It was funny. Who can tell one dead reindeer from another? One of the girls left after that. She was the one I liked.”

Ahead, sooner than Arkady had expected and clearer with every step, was the breathing hole. On an otherwise featureless surface it was a black pool within a ring of red ice, a startling break in the mist.

Automatically Karp began to slow down and look around. “We should have gotten drunk together sometime, just the two of us.” He snapped his butt into the water.

Arkady tossed his in, too. Pollution of the Bering Sea, he thought: one more crime. “Morgan radioed the
Polar Star
to expect two of us,” he reminded Karp.

“If he ever got his radio going. Anyway, it’s dangerous out here. A call doesn’t mean anything.”